The course focuses on the close reading in the original Latin of a wide selection of 13th and 14th Century Italian writers of hagiographic texts, Church documents, scientific inquiries, epic poetry, as well as of treatises about linguistics, poetics, ethics, and historiography. The course affords an opportunity to explore a representative selection of writings from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, three canonical medieval Italian writers, whose success as vernacular authors often effaces their remarkable and remarkably successful Latin works.

An introduction to the basic grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of Latin designed to enable students to read and understand simple Latin prose and verse.

The course aims at increasing facility in reading Latin prose and poetry, and introduces students to Roman literature in its historical and cultural contexts. We will combine review of grammar and syntax with careful readings of selections from Catullus' poems and from Caesar's and Cicero's works.

The course is an introduction to the rich tradition of Latin epic, and to the study of allusion as a literary technique. We will focus on the motif of the descent to the underworld, from Vergil to late antiquity (Claudian) and the renaissance (Petrarch, Vida), with particular emphasis on Vergil's account of Aeneas' journey to consult the shade of his father, and the epic of the early empire (Lucan, Statius, Silius). The pace is designed to allow students to build skills in reading Latin epic poetry.

Close reading of Horace's lyric Odes and iambic Epodes, with attention to his poetic program and techniques, ancient and modern theories of lyric, and the contemporary Augustan context.